Michael MuchmoreCuilAfter such dominance by one player, it's nice to see some movement in the Web-search arena. But though Cuil offers some intriguing new takes on search, it has a ways to go before becoming a real threat to Google and Yahoo!.

After such dominance by one player, it's nice to see some movement in the Web-search arena. But though Cuil offers some intriguing new takes on search, it has a ways to go before becoming a real threat to Google and Yahoo!.

Getting Results

Though Cuil claims to have the largest Web-page index, for most queries it displayed fewer total results than competitors. A search for "giraffe" reported 1.4 million hits. Google showed 15.1 million, Live Search found 5.8 million, and Yahoo! claimed 28.9 milliona pattern that seemed to hold, in general. And where Google, Live, and Yahoo! let you page through all of the results, Cuil significantly limits what you can see, offering about 23 pages of results in total. But how many results do you really need? I'd say just a few very useful ones in most cases, and that's what Cuil aims for.

Cuil's results layout is a big break from what you're used to. You get a choice of a two- or three-column display with tabs for result filters across the top and a Category box on the right offering related topics. Results include not only more text than most current search engines provideusually a full paragraphbut also related images. The layout is surely easier on the eyes than the results pages of the leading search engines, with a more booklike appearance, but because the blurb lengths are variable, the headings don't line up, making it actually less scannable, in my opinion.

It would take thousands of years to test a Web search site's results for relevance and accuracy for all purposes and users, but in my day's worth of searching, the results were for the most part relevant and accurate. The search for "giraffe" produced some useful results, but a lot of them were for entities that really had nothing to do with the long-necked mammal of Africa, but simply used the word in their organization's title, such as the Hotel Giraffe. A name search, for "Grace Hopper," perfectly turned up an entry and photo of the pioneering Rear Admiral and computer scientist. Contrary to what John C. Dvorak said in his pan of the search site, you don't need to capitalize names properly for the search to work. Maybe that's something they tweaked since John looked? A Cuil search on Dvorak's name, however, turns up far fewer useful results than a similar search on Google does. Cuil's doesn't even include a link to his blog or to his column here at PC Magazine (which perhaps accounts for his vitriolic review of the site). A search for "Geneva Conventions," however, returned perfect results, the first including the actual text.

Timeliness of search results is another thing I look for in search, using terms from fresh news stories to test it. Since Cuil itself was heavily covered on tech news sites this day of its launch, using its name seemed like a good bet. Unfortunately, I got nothing about the search engine but lots about Irish travel. Even typing "cuil search" resulted in no relevant hits. The first two Google search results for "cuil" were dead-on if you were looking for the new search engine (but those looking for info on traditional Irish topics would've been out of luck). Yahoo! turned up the search engine news and home page (and some info on the Shire of Cuil Cholium). Microsoft Live search also first presented a few results on the search engine, and then some items on local Irish lore, which seems most useful for general search.

The filtering tabs aren't always very useful: My search for "giraffe" produced tabs for "Hotel Giraffe," "Little Giraffe", and "Reticulated Giraffe." I'd have preferred tabs not just for results including the word "giraffe," but perhaps also phrases like "African wildlife." The Category box was more successful getting at these kinds of results: It offered Fauna of Kenya. It also offered, for some reason, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and "Children's Books by Roald Dahl." No doubt these have links to giraffes, but they don't really seem to be major categories related to my search. What happened to "quadripeds" or even "mammals"? Admittedly, what I'm hoping for would probably require either human editors or a semantic-Web implementation. Still, one of Cuil's features is an algorithm based on organization of ideas rather than links popularity. This haphazard presentation makes me worry a bit about the underlying algorithm.

When you place the mouse over any of the category titles, a panel with relevant links slides down. These links, however, go not to Web pages but to more Cuil search result pages for the related categories, each of which displays an explanatory tooltip when you hover the cursor over it.

I also look for speed in finding resultsan aspect of Google that wowed everyone when it first began to dominate Web search, but one that's now equaled by Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search. Unfortunately, first-day growing pains prevented a clear assessment of Cuil's search speed, which was occasionally acceptable and sometimes slower than I'd like to see. I'll reconsider this when the service has shaken out the kinks.Next: Privacy and Safety

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Bottom Line: After such dominance by one player, it's nice to see some movement in the Web-search arena. But though Cuil offers some intriguing new takes on search, it has a ways to go before becoming a real threat to Google and Yahoo!.

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About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

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